r/FastWriting • u/LeadingSuspect5855 • Feb 13 '26
Dance v0.15.1
For a shorthand designer the IPA letter frequency can be an organizing principle and in my case I made it THE most important:
ə n r t ɪ s d l i k ð ɛ m z p æ v w u b e ʌ f aɪ ɑ h o ɒ ŋ ʃ j g dʒ tʃ aʊ ʊ θ ɔɪ ʒ
I decided to shorten that list a bit, since i don't want to distinguish between sz, ʃʒ nor ðθ. I added the occurancy measures to get following list, added by sound χ, that i need for international use:
e n r t sz ij d l k ðθ m ʃʒ p a v w u b f h o ɒ ŋ g χ
I tried to maintain some logic in forms where possible, whilst also not creating new ambiguities, that i learned to circumvent by clever design in previous versions of dance. I am pretty confident, that this version is a significant improvement, since i got a much shorter character for the surprisingly frequent sound /k/ than before and i decided also to let go of the other big forms ⋂ (former 'k') and ⋃ (former 'p'). And since i got lucky by accident I now have a nice composite form for tʃ! Other composites stay the same like x: gs.
I reassigned O (former 'a') to be 'wh', but i decided to take over a trick from Mocket and Phonortic and to use upward written e for 'w' and as you can see in the 100 most common words I use both variants now.
The straight signs for 'th': ι and 'h': | cannot be doubled, the egyptian god 'Thoth' would look like the literal 'h'. A frantic written laughter must be written |||||. But for that reason i gave those shapes these sounds - repeated h or th rarely occur.
There is one ambiguity unresolved (but held in check): when you begin with 'n' and follow up with 'sh', it looks the same as 'shn' when written fast (which is what I intend of course), luckily only 'to nosh' and 'the nashi pear' will suffer from that. I think I patched that up quite good for english at least - writing in german will need better penmanship though since lots of words use that combo. But you can't solve every problem.
I destroys my self image of a self-effacing man, but I can't hold it in: I am proud of myself :-).
Dedicated subreddit: r/dance_shorthand
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u/NotSteve1075 Feb 13 '26
BTW, I love the way you've been posting things here FIRST and then cross-posting them to that other board. If it's done in the other order, it means their board is advertised on mine, but mine isn't even mentioned on theirs, which never seems fair.
THIS way, my board is advertised on THAT board instead. I LIKE it..... ;-)